


Silhouettes Inside a Dream

by mossy_kit



Category: Blaseball (Video Game)
Genre: AU, Canada Moist Talkers (Blaseball Team), Gen, blaseball-typical incinerations, insofar as anything in blaseball can be an AU anyway, seasons 1-3, vaguely implied offscreen sexual content
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-02
Updated: 2021-02-02
Packaged: 2021-03-13 22:35:33
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,892
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29161275
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mossy_kit/pseuds/mossy_kit
Summary: You wake up with no memories in a doorless facility with 13 strangers, and you play ball.(an AU where nothing exists outside blaseball itself)
Comments: 6
Kudos: 6
Collections: Canada Moist Talkers Fanfiction





	Silhouettes Inside a Dream

**Author's Note:**

> So this isn't my actual headcanon or anything but I liked how some of the character moments turned out so here it is! 
> 
> Note that a bunch of players are referred to with they/them pronouns until they establish their actual pronouns when they meet each other properly - this isn't meant to be misgendering, the POV character just doesn't know what to use yet. I think I mostly stuck with what's on the wiki for actual pronouns.
> 
> Title is from Plastic 100° C by Sampha.

You wake all at once into a dark, cold room.

There’s a thin bar of light on the floor, just at the corner of the room, under what you hope is a door. You’re blinking as you sit up and see the shape of the room, or more accurately the lack of it – it’s rectangular, utterly undecorated, near completely featureless. There’s a table by the side of the twin bed, and a dresser in the corner, and other than that it’s bare. You swing yourself off the bed and onto the floor, and you almost wince – it seems like it must be concrete, and it’s freezing cold, but you press on anyways.

Before you turn the handle, you wait a moment, wonder if you should be cautious, wonder what’s out there. It hits you all of a sudden that you really don’t know anything at all; like, you have no idea where you are, or why, or anything that happened before you woke up this morning, like it’s all just completely absent. Your mind’s racing but there’s no handholds inside your head, nothing at all to cling to, and you can almost feel the freefall as you take a sharp breath and turn the knob.

To your surprise it swings open easily, and you lean out into the hall. To either side of you, there are doors; they stretch out until the hallway turns a corner, and you can’t see what’s beyond it. The lights set into the wall between each door, cold and sterile and incandescent, almost hurt after the dark. You take a few tentative steps into the hallway.

There are nameplates on the doors, inscribed in serif with names you don’t recognize. Cain, Bates, Alstott, Voorhees – and on they go, and you start counting them, but then you realize there are doors behind you and you drop it, and you press on towards the corner.

A door opens, somewhere behind you, and you whirl around, catch a very surprised looking person standing in the hall looking at you, eyes wide. They’re wearing these smock-looking dark grey pyjamas, which you realize belatedly are identical to what you’re wearing. They look like they can’t decide if they want to turn right around and go back to their room, or maybe try and dash past you, make some kind of escape. You raise your hands in a placating sort of gesture, try and make yourself look nonthreatening.

“Hey, uh,” you say, and you’re about to introduce yourself except you realize you don’t know your own name and that’s definitely unsettling, but whatever, that’s a problem for later, you suppose. “Did you just wake up here too?”

“Yeah,” they say, quietly, “Do you… do you know what’s going on?”

“No,” you say, and their face falls. “But we can go check it out together, if you want?”

“Okay,” they almost whisper. You’re not sure if they’re agreeing because they have any interest in seeing what’s going on, or they’re just scared, but either way, you’re glad to at least have someone around. This place isn’t getting any _less_ creepy the more you walk around, that’s for sure.

Together the two of you round the corner and then another one, another series of doors with names, and then the hallway opens up and you’re standing in a huge kitchen, dining room, and living room combo sort of situation, equipped with one very long table that looks like it’d fit at least a dozen people, a couple of kitchen stations, no less than three massive fridges and what looks like an industrial freezer, and then a bunch of couches and a TV screen bolted securely into the wall.

Half the screen displays a smooth white circle, beside which is printed “Canada Moist Talkers” in stark white against pure black. Underneath, the numbers 0 – 0. The other half is a list of names – names that match the names from the doors. The first name on the list is “Kennedy Alstott” – which you remember from one of the doors – and beside it are three little white stars. You read down the line and you don’t realise until right near the end that you’re looking for one that feels like yours, but all of them feel just as foreign. You kick yourself for not reading your own door before you left.

“Trevino Merritt,” your new friend breathes, almost under their breath, like it’s brand new to them, but maybe like it’s precious too. Like it’s all they have. “Trevino.”

“The hell is all this?” you hear, and Trevino nearly jumps out of their skin. Behind you, at the door, wielding what looks to be a side table identical to the one in your room as if it’s a weapon, stands another person, sort of small and vaguely feline-looking, sizing the two of you up. And behind them is a huge figure, probably eight feet tall, sort of looming behind them. The effect might have been more intimidating, had the bigger one looked any less like an absolute sweetheart.

“We don’t know,” you say. “We just got here.”

The taller figure gurgles as if to answer. The other lowers the table, just slightly.

“Yeah, yeah,” they say over their shoulder, then turn back to the two of you. “Okay, well. Fine. Lemme see.”

They cross over, giving the two of you a wide berth, until they’re close enough that they can see the TV properly.

“Well. I’m Hobbs, that’s Richmond. Which ones are you?” the smaller one – Hobbs - says, after a long moment, and Richmond gurgles again, sounding even more pleased.

“I don’t know,” you say. “Forgot to check before I left.”

Hobbs side eyes you, as if maybe you’re just like, pretending not to know to mess with them somehow. You shrug.

“Trevino Merritt,” Trevino says.

“I’m Eugenia!” comes a voice from around the corner, and all four of you jump. Hobbs brandishes the side table, throws a protective arm back in Richmond’s general direction.

“Sorry, I don’t, uh, really sleep, in that kinda way? So I’ve been up for a while.” They say, and then they pop their head around the corner. They’re kind of amorphous, a vaguely human shaped figure who almost looks like some kind of found-material modern art sculpture, held together by a thick layer of green ooze. They look absolutely thrilled to see anyone else, and barely even seem phased at Hobbs’ table wielding.

“I’m not like, a great cook, but I made breakfast, so do any of you want pancakes?”

No one behind you speaks, but you realize all of a sudden you’re absolutely starving. There’s a part of you that’s still very freaked out, but when it comes down to it the hunger wins out.

“Absolutely,” you say, and they somehow smile even wider. “I uh, didn’t catch my name on my room door. But it’s nice to meet you, Eugenia,” you say, and you follow them into the kitchen. After a long moment, the other three follow too.

Over the next few hours, you meet everyone else, sorting out names and pronouns as everyone gets a chance to check the list on their way in. Some of them seem standoffish, or nervous, while others seem defiant from the start.

You still don’t know who you’re supposed to be, although you find you almost don’t even care. Rather than go back and check your door, you find yourself just waiting, crossing off possibilities by elimination. For a while, your money’s on Notarobot, but then someone enters who is so very clearly an android that you figure that’s gotta just be… some kind of cosmic joke, or something. And then for a while you’re thinking maybe you’re Greer Lott, which has kind of a fun ring to it, but then they kind of swagger in, an hour after the next last person, a general aura of danger covering up the fact that you’re pretty sure they’re significantly more nervous than they’re trying to seem.

And then you’re left with the last name on the list, and correspondingly, the one with the most stars: Jenkins Good. Big shoes, you think to yourself. You hope you can fill them.

\----

You learn to play the game underneath an endless, perfectly black sky.

After you’ve all eaten, a door, almost perfectly hidden in the wall at the front of the living room, slides open, and you all emerge through it onto a field of almost platonically green grass, all somehow perfectly regulation length down to the blade, inscribed with lines that almost glow in the dark laying out the shape of a blaseball field. Cold white light shines down from tall posts. In the distance, as far as you can see in every direction, there is only darkness, complete and unbroken, which seems to consume the light almost as soon as it leaves the field area.

In the dugout, there are duffel bags, each inscribed with a name. Most of them have bats, but yours just has a glove and then some miscellanea. If any of you are unsettled that the gloves fit a little too perfectly, well, no one brings it up.

After you get over the initial awkwardness, it’s kind of fun, actually. The pitchers are throwing wide and short, and the batters swing wildly, sending ball after ball careening over the field. By the end of the day you’re starting to get the hang of it, some kind of muscle memory starting to kick in. You don’t have enough players to make teams properly, but you try a game anyway, deploying Greer, Morse, and Oliver as batters to round out the lineups.

Elijah and Trevino, on opposing teams, each have a copy of the pocket rulebooks which had been in each of the bags, and they call out rule violations that get increasingly ridiculous the longer it goes on until you could swear they’re both just making it up. Nobody’s keeping score, but eventually Joe hits this perfect home run dinger, and everyone sort of stops and watches it sail off, and then all kind of decide at the same time to leave on a high note, so you all pack up your stuff and head back inside.

\----

The first uncertain night in that place, the halls ring out with this almost haunting noise, unearthly and ethereal, like a whale’s swan song, and everyone’s out in the halls trying to figure out what it means.

“Should we try and break back into the main room?” whispers Kennedy, towards the general group.

“Well,” Greer answers, sarcastically, “I personally like my internal organs where they are, but you should definitely, for sure go check it out.”

“The door’s locked,” says Trevino, barely half out of his door. “Shouldn’t we just… wait it out?”

“That’s not even the direction it’s coming from,” whispers Elijah, as if something’s going to hear him.

“If it’s dangerous, then we need to…” Tyler starts, and then cuts off when they see Hobbs emerge from his room, completely ignoring the rest of you, and cross over to Richmond’s room just down the hall.

“Hey, what are you doing?” they ask, still in a whisper.

Hobbs looks back at them like they just asked if the sky was black.

“Helping,” he says, and then he goes in, and eventually Richmond stops crying.

The next morning, he drags his bed into Richmond’s room, and you never hear that sound again.

\----

There’s kind of an easy rhythm to it, before long. You learn to play the game, and when the games start happening, one every single day, you start to look forward to them, if at least for some kind of structure. You like pitching, and you like doing your best to explain what you seem to just kind of _know_ to the others who struggle more with it. Morse is insanely persistent, trying so hard to imitate the way you twist when you release the ball, the minute movements of it, but he’s not quite there, and he throws ball after ball out of the strike zone. It’s okay. It just means the whole team cheers all the harder when he has a good game, and anyway, none of you really care all that much about winning. It doesn’t seem to affect anything when you do or don’t, anyway.

Your team loses the first two games, but wins the third, and when you let out that last breath after your final pitch, when the team starts collapsing around you to congratulate each other, you feel like maybe whatever the hell this is really isn’t so bad at all.

\----

Inside, the fourteen of you stake your claims and learn to exist in the strange, constant closeness of the dorms. By a couple days in everyone has a designated seat in the living room, and most have ravaged through the cupboards and figured out which ones are the good snacks and which ones kind of taste like wet fabric. Then, a few days after that, everyone has figured out how to successfully hoard the ones that taste good, and feed the rest to the people who don’t technically have taste buds.

No one’s really in charge, but eventually Tyler proposes a meal and chore rotation which everyone else reluctantly agrees to. It gets changed within the first few weeks as it becomes clear at least a good half of you can’t cook to save your lives. From there, it’s easier, and everyone relaxes a little when it becomes clear that the pantries get filled overnight once a week, while the common room is locked for “maintenance.” You won’t starve, at least.

There are squabbles and fights. The pricklier types keep to themselves for a while, and others seem distant, but you make do. It almost looks like Tyler and Greer are actually going to physically fight each other after dinner one night, when Greer shirks dish duty yet again, but Elijah informs you the next morning that they seemed to be getting along very well indeed in Tyler’s room afterwards, and Greer actually does dishes from then on, so no one complains.

\----

You don’t all quite realize anything is happening until Jesús is calling everyone over to the TV, saying something about an election, so you all emerge confused from your rooms and file into the living room.

On the screen is a figure, identified on the screen as “the Commissioner.” He looks young - a teenager, maybe, in a poorly-fitting suit standing at a lectern, and there’s an incredibly thick layer of static laid over the image, so his voice is sort of fading in and out.

“Solar eclipse,” he says, and you look at Jesús, staring wide-eyed and horrified at the screen, and you are listening very carefully when he continues, “Star player Jaylen Hotdogfingers is incinerated.”

No one in the room makes a sound as he continues, but you’re barely able to even process what he’s saying because you’ve just got her face in your head, standing on the mound, laughing with her teammates after a game. You hadn’t ever really talked to her properly but you remember telling her good game, once, after she’d pitched a blazing one, and she’d smiled this fierce little smile, and you could tell she loved the game just like you did, and what the hell did he mean, incinerated, that was ridiculous, wasn’t it? Jaylen’s fine, she has to be, you know she has to be.

“The Discipline Era begins,” the Commissioner says, and then he looks like maybe he wants to say something else, but then he doesn’t, and it’s on to blessings, and he’s listing teams you’ve never even heard of, and you’re still thinking about Jaylen, and wondering what comes next.

\----

You’re not pitching when Jenna Maldonado goes up in flames. You’re distracted, even, looking off into the distance and thinking about what you’re gonna make for dinner, of all things, and you don’t even see the ump’s eyes go white, but you hear one of the Dale scream, and you look up and they’re already ash, drifting to the ground through the stagnant air under the solemn eye of the eclipsed sun.

\----

You’re not pitching when Trevino dies either, but you’re not lucky enough not to be paying attention, not this time.

The ump’s eyes aren’t the only thing that changes, you can see now. Their entire posture shifts, all at once; bored and authoritative to hungry, sharp, something almost feral. Those eyes glow through their helmet and you’re already trying to vault out of the dugout but Kennedy is closer and they collide with the ump at full tilt and…knock right off, fall to the ground gracelessly, and the ump just stands there, barely even sparing a look at them. Trevino, frozen in place, looks directly at the umpire so you know he sees it coming, and at the last moment you see him shut his eyes, and then it’s over.

By the side of the field, there’s a figure, lying all of a sudden in the fetal position by the Talker dugout and everyone’s helping them up and they’re wobbling on legs that are only a little on fire and a head that’s definitely on fire and it hits you all at once this is Trevino’s replacement, that he’s really gone. Greer sets her teeth and winds up again.

What really hits you about it though is seeing Simon’s name on Trev’s door. Inside, the room bears none of the drawings he had stuck to the walls with various food glues, and the bed is more meticulously made than he ever would have, and the mug he kept by his bed for water is back in the kitchen, and it’s like…like he was just never there.

\----

You hold a little ceremony with everyone, in the living room, write some words. It’s awkward and a few of you cry and it’s kind of beautiful too. You paste a drawing Eugenia did of him on the wall right next to the TV, next to the roster that doesn’t have his name on it anymore. You’ll remember him. You will.

\----

The season 2 elections are on screen and you’re all on edge, but the decree’s just the fourth strike for some teams you almost never play and peanuts, whatever that means. Then they get down to the blessings, and frankly every one they announce kind of sounds more horrific than the next. The Rack? Blood Sacrifice? What was worse was now that you weren’t so dazed you were listening and it sounds like someone from your team – not your teammates, but someone representing you, maybe? – had voted for that one, in relatively large numbers. You weren’t sure what kind of blessing that was supposed to be, but it didn’t sound much like a blessing at all.

The commissioner announces you won something called “Defection” and one moment Oliver’s sitting stiffly in the armchair and the next someone else is sitting in his seat, stoic and seemingly unsurprised at the development, their hands clenched bloodlessly tight into fists on their lap.

“Shit.” says Jesús, and you can’t tell whether he’s talking about Oliver’s disappearance or the sudden appearance of the pitcher who’s rumored to be the best in the league in his place. Tyler shoots him a look, but doesn’t say anything else.

“Welcome to the team,” you say, after a silence that feels like it lasts ages.

“Thanks,” they say, flatly, not quite meeting anyone’s gaze.

Eventually, you all make a proper introduction, and Dot introduces themselves too. You’ll all give them their space. It has to be hard, being ripped from their team like that; you don’t want to make it worse.

You salvage Oliver’s things, his favourite mug to pretend he was drinking out of and the grip Kennedy had fashioned for him so it was easier for him to keep hold of the ball. You’ll give it to him the next time you play the Crabs. You hope they’ll treat him well.

\---

The next season there are birds, and they creep everyone out. No one knows where they come from or where they go, and they wheel ominously over the field while you play. You’re kind of intrigued, but you keep it to yourself. Peanuts, too. They fall out of the sky, no clouds in sight, just cascading out of the infinite dark, and you can feel them crunch underfoot.

You’re pitching when Simon looks up at the wrong time and one falls in their mouth and they start having an allergic reaction and you have to carry them off the field. They’re choking and choking and then at last they stand up and then later they’re up to bat again and they just don’t have it, their coordination’s gone, they can barely even hit the ball.

You all avoid them as best you can until Elijah accidentally swallows one a few weeks later, except it makes him better, somehow, which doesn’t make a lot of sense. Simon says they’re not resentful at all, but sometimes you see them side eyeing Elijah, just a little.

\----

Kennedy gets incinerated and all you can think is hopefully they and Trevino are together. You’re not really the religious type, but then again, this whole situation is so weird that you wouldn’t count out anything yet. Some of you had sort of started… leaving things, in other people’s rooms, people they trusted, and so whoever or whatever empties out the rooms doesn’t get to take Kennedy’s short story collection, inscribed on the notepad paper with the ILB logo from the living room. You read one that they particularly liked, at their ceremony.

You hear their replacement pacing the halls at night during his first few weeks, trying to pick impenetrable locks or scratch through the walls, or something. Once, he even walked off into the distance, beyond the darkness of the field, determined to find some way out of this “messed up place, literally what the hell, how do you all just… play, like this is normal?” and for a moment you panicked and worried that he was going to get lost for good, but he came back soon after, looking well and truly stymied, and more than a little shaken.

He makes a mean casserole though, so he’s pretty popular as soon as he starts opening up. He makes a bunch when Tyler dies, when it hits all of you hard. Eugenia does another drawing, and then you all get up and play another game.

\----

Sometimes when you dream, you see a world that you feel like you should remember. There are cities, there, standing tall against a jarringly blue sky, against clouds that promise weather which does not come with consequences. People walk in parks and sit by oceans and go to grocery stores and you know what they are even though you haven’t ever seen any of it. And sometimes you can hear them, and sometimes what they say is familiar, so familiar, and sometimes you think maybe they’re even saying your name and then you get this déjà vu that spills outwards and becomes a splitting migraine and then you wake up gasping into that blank, black room.

By the time morning comes, you don’t remember a thing.


End file.
